The Architect Expresses His Collecting Impulse in Santiago, Chile

It is unlikely that chilean architect Carlos Alberto Cruz would ever have been commissioned by a client to design the residence and art gallery he constructed for himself over the past 30 years in his native Santiago. In that city, where, as he puts it, “foreign architecture has been imported and reproduced in a very fast way,” and where he is known for modernist commercial and institutional projects like the addition to Chile’s United Nations complex, Cruz’s decades-long immersion in the rich classicism that defines his own estate has largely been a private pursuit.

“In the 1960s a lot of the ideas of Richard Neutra and other contemporary American and European architects were introduced here, ideas that had not been part of our architecture,” Cruz says. “I was fascinated with volumes made of glass and with certain devices by Le Corbusier, such as his modules and geometric grid. However, buildings of lesser quality began to appear—in the interesting new style but with interiors not relating to anything earlier than the 20th century. I wanted my house to have the organizational temperament of contemporary architecture yet be less specific, more poetic. I wanted to make several experiences of architecture. One way of doing that was to incorporate an openness that ideally over time will relieve the floor plan and reset the destiny of the spaces.”

Situated on 10 acres in Chile’s verdant Central Valley, Cruz’s 7,000-square-foot residence and gallery were designed on a grid, with large and small modules dictating the spatial relationships inside and out. “The flat square is a very simple tool for creating harmony,” Cruz points out. “It also allows a precision and efficiency that you don’t have in nature.” The primary structural material for the buildings and garden components is a locally quarried stone, pink from Andean iron, whose density and presence only underscore the security aspect of Cruz’s architectural program. Ancient and rusticated, implying geological permanence, stone was the ideal element to fuse structure and mass in a house requiring both.

Cruz is a collector first and an architect second. “My father and grandfather were architects, and I have that in my blood,” he says, “but I come from seven generations of collectors. I learned very early that certain objects are precious, that they have a soul. As a young child, I would dream about the ones in my father’s house.” When Cruz was seven years old, his grandmother gave him money as a first communion gift. In keeping with his heritage, he bought a Manet still life.

His collecting having been, by his description, “more than lifelong,” the art and antiques he has acquired are notable: Prominent among paintings from Spain’s golden age is Velázquez’s 1620 The Venerable Mother, Sor Jerónima de la Fuente. Spanish masters Murillo, Zurbarán, Ribera and others are represented as well in the gallery. There is a Goya in the library. Additionally, Cruz has long amassed Spanish colonial silver, 18th-century Chippendale-inspired Spanish colonial furniture, early colonial textiles and tapestries and important South American manuscripts. Even the selection of Chilean cactus that he planted in the entrance patio seems to have been made with a curatorial eye.

Cruz conceived his gallery as a pavilion in the garden, as it would have been unthinkable for him to separate the artworks and objects from his daily living. Essentially a series of barrel-vaulted roofs atop a rectilinear volume (an abutting domed tower encases a private chapel), the gallery is a classical complement to the lush landscape. Deep clerestory windows inside the roof forms, along with museum-quality lighting, illuminate the main space—which is underground and could have been cave-like. Contributing to the almost contrary absence of heaviness is the manner in which Cruz’s Spanish masters are displayed. Each stands on a steel easel, a truncated-pyramid base with linear rods, that anchors it and holds it away from the wall. This “floating” of the paintings employs them as a separate, animating plane of the spatial envelope.

Apart from the dominance of stone, the infusion of natural light is the signifier of each building in the compound. The house is sited to the north, and during the day the interior, particularly the frescoed columns and walls, experiences a spectrum “from brilliant to deep to subtle colors.” The frescoes were done as much to add an Italian romanticist overlay as to establish a uniformity in the walls’ response to light: Rough surfaces (the stone, the brick ceilings, the heavy beams) capture sunlight; Cruz didn’t want any “soft” surfaces—walls covered with oil-based paint—to compromise that effect and thus “interfere with the architecture’s readability.”

Observing that “in the formal sense, the house is not derivative of anything,” Cruz allows that “the palette is similar, and the architectural search, clearly, very similar” to Frank Lloyd Wright’s for his small Pasadena, California, gem La Miniatura (see Architectural Digest, December 1994). There, as here, a double-height living room is softly illuminated by light coming through floor-to-ceiling windows and bouncing off a highly textural wall surface (concrete blocks in Wright’s case). Evident in the gallery’s barrel vaults and chapel tower are vestiges of Islamic architecture, while the vaults alone strikingly reference Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. The coffered steel ceiling contrasts with the Mayan ziggurats of the stair walls and calls to mind the structural system of Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery in Berlin. Notes Cruz of the overlapping cultures and influences: “Architecture is about the community of spirits. The exact roots of something are not always known.”

Cruz recognizes that his project’s long gestation is something a non-collector architect might not have so willingly endured. “I know all about lasting things,” he explains. “It doesn’t matter the style, or whether it is modern or old—both architecture and objects have to be lived with over time.” And the three decades devoted to the ambitious endeavor of construction? “Art asks a lot from you,” he says simply.